


Back To Reality

by Merixcil



Series: Keeping It Moving [2]
Category: Daenamhyup | DNH, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:00:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23900461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Ikje gets back from the army
Series: Keeping It Moving [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722739





	Back To Reality

Ikje gets out in the middle of summer, right before the monsoon starts.

It’s a long drive from his final station to Busan, six hours of wilting foliage and mountains he’s spent entirely too much time clambering over these past two years. Ikje passes the ride with his face plastered to the window and his uniform sticking to him in all the wrong places. His pack sits uncomfortably between his knees – it’s heavy and awkwardly shaped but there’s nowhere else to put it so for the sake of a few personal belongings he suffers pins and needles all the way home.

Home. From the moment he stepped out of barracks this morning Ikje swears he’s been able to smell the sea. He misses it more sorely than he would ever have imagined he could when he first signed himself in to the Busan wing of the South Korean army, misses air fresh despite the pollution and a skyline falling off into infinity. It’s not like he’d never spent significant time away from home before, but everything seems so much more distant when placed out of reach.

The bus turns a corner through the rise between two mountain peaks and all of a sudden the city sprawls before them, all the way down to an ocean glistening in late afternoon sunshine.

His pack rolls off his shoulders and his body rolls onto his bed. Ikje stares at the ceiling and follows the cracks in the plaster that haven’t changed since he was last here two years ago, the posters on the wall faded but untouched. His room is like a time capsule, the similarities between now and the day he left almost unbearably eerie.

Sighing, Ikje stretches out, sliding a hand under his pillow as he goes to find his phone exactly where he left it. They don’t allow phones in the army and he didn’t trust Taegyun to keep it safe for when he was on leave and so it’s been sitting in his bedroom gathering dust. He can’t remember where he put the charger and he wouldn’t be surprised if it had broken of its own accord but he hits the power button out of habit.

And to his surprise the screen blinks into life.

It takes five minutes for the onslaught of bleeps and vibrations that signal text messages and missed calls to die down. Ikje opens his message folder excitedly but is disappointed to find that the last fifty or so texts are nothing but promotional spam for deals he’s too late to claim. Scowling, he deletes them one by one and tries not to take it too personally that people have stopped trying to get in contact with him, he supposes he wouldn’t waste precious credit on someone who he knew wasn’t going to reply.

It takes him ten minutes to work through the clutter to find a familiar name and when he does it takes him a moment to put it to a face. Min Yoongi, one of the people from Big Hit, one of the Not Namjoon people to be precise. A seventeen year old kid with a bad lisp and an attitude problem who had been biting at Ikje’s heels one way or another since they entered the final round of auditions. He was nice, in a grumpy, antisocial sort of way, but Ikje can’t for the life of him think why he would bother to keep in contact.

He opens the message and does a double take, “I miss you”, is all it says.

Yoongi misses him. Ikje stares blankly at the screen of his phone and wonders how on earth he’s supposed to respond. He hasn’t missed Yoongi these past two years, or dance practice or vocal training or unfairly long hours and strict diets. He hasn’t missed any part of being a trainee except for perhaps Namjoon and he liked Namjoon for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with Big Hit. He wonders if he can get away with deleting the text and pretending it never happened and glances at the ‘sent’ date.

Almost eighteen months back. Yoongi doesn’t miss him, Yoongi missed him a long time ago. He’ll be older now, hopefully old enough to know that Ikje is the last person he should be missing in amongst the stresses of his schedule and hopefully with Ikje out of the way he’ll have managed to make more of himself than a sullen boy in the corner.

And if he hasn’t, Ikje’s sure Namjoon will tell him as much.

From out across the ocean the faint rumble of thunder signals the first rain of the year and from the kitchen Ikje’s mum shouts something about dinner being ready. He doesn’t feel the faintest shred of guilt as he deletes the text, Yoongi will have moved on and Ikje never missed him anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'tumblr prompts' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have
> 
> Comments on the previous posting of this fic (just ask if you want me to remove yours) include:
> 
> >algessni: This makes me sad bc the description is on point. But its realistic tbh ;;  
> >>Merixcil: Ahh I'm a sucker for 'i know it's depressing but let's be realistic' type fics.  
> >>Thanks for reading and commenting <3


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